Archive for the ‘2009/08’ Category

A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost from the internationally acclaimed author of Grace and Stella Descending.

Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly find a sense of family and friendship, although nothing can match Erika’s connection to the rebellious misfit Ragnar. But when an act of senseless cruelty separates them forever—and drives the sisters from the island in shame and regret—they must leave childhood and their growing relationships behind. Now, twenty-five years later, they return to visit their ailing father and confront the specter of that awful summer.

A man is found murdered in his Reykjavík flat, and the police have no obvious leads. The man lived alone and had no family, and of his only two friends, one is serving time for an array of petty crimes and psychotic violence, and the other hasn’t been heard of for twenty-five years.

Erlendur and his colleague Sigurdur Óli head the investigation team. They find a computer filled with downloaded pornography, and in a desk, the photograph of a young girl’s grave and the cryptic note left behind by the killer. Delving into the dead man’s past, they discover that forty years ago he was accused, though not convicted, of rape. Now Erlendur has to follow his instincts when his colleagues are losing faith in the investigation. Foraging into the past, Erlendur discovers that the city of Reykjavík has one or two secrets of its own, secrets it would rather keep.

Jar City is the first in a new and exciting series of crime novels from the land of the saga, and was a runaway success in Iceland.

A writer wakes one night to find a strange man in her bedroom. He is a character she has invented, but not yet used, and so desperate is he to have his story told that he has resorted to breaking into her house.

She creates Alvar Eide, a quiet, middle-aged man whose life is carefully designed to avoid surprise, but when a young heroin addict comes into the gallery where he works, Alvar’s life is changed forever and his inventor realises that she cannot control the character she has created. The result is a superb novel that plays with the boundaries of fact and fiction.